By 1929 Hoppé had completed comprehensive photographic studies on Britain, Germany, and the United States, and he was ready to head for destinations more exotic. Late that year he set out to photograph Australia. Intending to stay for only a few months, he found the country so culturally rich that he photographed continuously for almost a full year.

Hoppé’s intensive photo-documentation was the first time a single photographer had covered the entire geography of this vast continent. With his acute ability to identify and define cultural identity in a people and their environment, Hoppé captured what it was to be Australian at a defining moment in the country’s history. Some of his subjects include a Sydney office girl, an opal miner in the desert town of Coober Pedy, lumberjacks working the Karri forests in Pemberton, Western Australia, apple orchard packers of Tasmania, the Aboriginal women looking at a European film poster, and the "The Death Ray" carnival sideshow at the Royal Agricultural Show, Sydney. With this collection, Hoppé gave us a comprehensive, collective national portrait of the Australian people and their country.

The book's dust-jacket illustrates the somewhat pretentious idea that Hoppé could sit on top of Australia as its omniscient observer. Despite the pretension, in retrospect, this aim was exactly what he achieved.